Black October 7: The Visitation

October 7, 2009

Are you just too damned smart for your own good? Do you sometimes wish you were a little simpler-minded, able to just stroll through life without a million megabytes of knowledge ripping through your RAM? Would you like to just dumb it down a bit? If so, let me know. I’ll send you my DVD of The Visitation. It’s guaranteed to make you stupider in two hours or less.

To my mind, there are two kinds of bad movies. There are the ones that know they’re bad, and revel in it. They’re cheap, they’re fun, and they’ll tell you so. Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter comes to mind. And then there are the other ones, the movies that take themselves scarily seriously, and yet fail. This is one of those.

Basic plot: A small town is visited by a miracle-doer whom people believe is the messiah returned. This messiah figure is played by Edward Furlong, who is so stoned throughout that he failed to notice the never-ending array of bad wigs placed on his head. I think he forgot he was supposed to be Jesus and decided he was Eddie Vedder instead. Martin Donovan and Kelly Lynch are part of the cast, which made me think this might be all right, but then I saw that Randy Travis is in it, and I thought “Maybe not.”

There is one very compelling scene involving Donovan spotting mysterious figures on the hill above his farm. It’s quite well done, and happens early on. I think the director, Robby Henson, figured out partway through that he had to pin his film on the success of that shot, so he keeps repeating it until it loses its impact. I like Robby Henson’s IMDB photo; it looks like he’s thinking “The Visitation? Man, even I wouldn’t watch that.”

This is the kind of movie you can take to your local hock shop and expect to get 50 cents for, if they agree to take it at all. Man, it’s sour.

In case you’re just tuning in, I’m going through my horror DVDs, one a day, throughout October. You can read about other films by clicking Black October under Hot Topics up there to your right.